NOVELISTS AND AGENTS


[_20 June '08_]

A bad publishing season is now drawing to a close, and in the air are
rumours of a crisis. Of course the fault is the author's. It goes without
saying that the fault is the author's. In the first place, he will insist
on producing mediocre novels. (For naturally the author is a novelist;
only novelists count when crises loom. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Edward
Carpenter, Robert Bridges, Lord Morley--these types have no relation to
crises.) It appears that the publishers have been losing money over the
six-shilling novel, and that they are not going to stand the loss any
longer. It is stated that never in history were novels so atrociously
mediocre as they are to-day. And in the second place, the author will
insist on employing an Unspeakable Rascal entitled a literary agent, and
the poor innocent lamb of a publisher is fleeced to the naked skin by this
scoundrel every time the two meet. Already I have heard that one
publisher, hitherto accustomed to the services of twenty gardeners at his
country house, has been obliged to reduce the horticultural staff to
eighteen.

Such is the publishers' explanation of the crisis. I shall keep my own
explanation till the crisis is a little more advanced and ready to burst.
In the meantime I should like to ask: How _do_ people manage to range over
the whole period of the novel's history and definitely decide that novels
were never so bad as they are now? I am personally inclined to think that
at no time has the average novel been so good as it is to-day. (This view,
by the way, is borne out by publishers' own advertisements, which abound
in the word "masterpiece" quoted from infallible critics of great